“Curiosity is natural to the soul of man and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections.”

The Power of Thought: A Twenty-First Century Adaptation of Annie Besant's http://books.google.co.in/books?id=SVKqq0dTdSMC&printsec=frontcover, p. backcover

Manners, Morals and the Novel
The Liberal Imagination (1950)

&quot;On the Past and Future&quot; <br class="br"> Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 1: opening sentence of chapter 1.

Source: Concerning the Spiritual in Art

On relations between the US and the UK, as quoted in "Kingman Brewster Jr., 69, Ex-Yale President and U.S. Envoy, Dies" in The New York Times (9 November 1988)

Interview with Gunther Schuller (1965, p. 34), quoted in Sound Structure in Music (1975) bu Robert Erickson; University of California Press. .
Context: I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather... So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage.

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.15

Quoted as the opening passage of "BOOK ONE: The Functions of Language" in Language in Thought and Action (1949) by S. I. Hayakawa, p. 3
Words and Their Meanings (1940)
Context: A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.
This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. "A mere matter of words," we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.